The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

TPB decamps for Spain and Norway after Swedish Pirate Party is threatened.

The Swedish Pirate Party has stopped hosting the notorious website The Pirate Bay, according to TorrentFreak. While no one knows where the site is actually run from, Web-hosting services have been provided through the Swedish Pirate Party for a few years now.

Now, the site's hosting will be taken care of by the Pirate Parties in Norway and Spain. TPB is being forced to move because the Swedish Pirate Party is under pressure from Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group representing large music and movie interests. Rights Alliance threatened legal action against the Pirate Party if the group didn't stop hosting the site by tomorrow.

Spain in particular could turn out to be a safe haven for the piracy-driven website, since judges in that country have found simply linking to other infringing sites is not a basis for copyright liability. The sports-streaming site Rojadirecta, for example, was exonerated after legal action against it was initiated in Spain. (That didn't stop it from having its domain name grabbed by a US agency, before being given back last summer.)

The Pirate Bay is a decade old now, and was recently the subject of a 90-minute documentary called TPB AFK. One of the site's three co-founders is currently in exile in Laos, avoiding Swedish arrest warrants.